Controlled Remote Viewing

This may surprise many of the people who come across this page: It’s not necessary to have some kind of “gift” to be psychic. And you don’t have to take my word for it. That is just what the scientists who researched ESP for the US military were themselves surprised to discover. “Being psychic” was not really a “gift” at all. Their experiments showed that nearly everyone had some of this ability. Instead of being a rare talent that only a special few could ever have, it now turns out that anyone who wants to learn the proper techniques and work hard can master the fundamentals. Controlled Remote Viewing, or CRV is the method developed at Stanford Research Institute (now SRI-International) to help military personnel do just that. And, thanks to the CIA declassifying it beginning in 1995, CRV training is now available to you, too.

How Controlled Remote Viewing Got Started

As experimental work in remote viewing progressed in the late 1970s and into early 1980s, two of the most prominent figures in the government remote viewing program were thinking seriously about how they could pass remote viewing skills along to beginners. Dr. Harold E. Puthoff and Ingo Swann hoped to develop a way to transfer the skill with a shorter and less painful learning curve than the trial-and-error approach used by most remote viewers up to that time. After all, you can learn to play the piano on your own. But if you have a teacher to show you the ropes and a consistent method or approach, it is far easier and faster to learn. If it makes sense for playing piano and other humanly-achievable skills, why not for an ESP skill such as remote viewing?

It happened that while researchers at SRI were wondering how to transfer remote viewing skills to beginners, Gen. Albert Stubblebine, commander of the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) wanted to find a way to turn ordinary Army intelligence personnel into new remote viewers to work in INSCOM’s remote viewing program (then code-named Grill Flame, but now referred to as “Star Gate”).

Up to this point, the psychic spies in the Grill Flame were either natural or self-taught “generic” remote viewers. Some informal RV methods had developed over the few short years Grill Flame had existed. But, though they often produced exceptional results, the pool of available “natural” remote viewers was too small to provide the number of recruits an expanded program would need. The Army would have to find and train viewers who might not realize that they could be psychic.

Puthoff and Swann had at least a basic foundation from which to begin. First, the two had learned that the majority of humans have the innate ability to extend their consciousness to distant or hidden locations or events and “bring back” information – but most had just never tried it, or did not believe they could do it. Second, enough was finally known about the psychology of how the human subconscious interacts with conscious awareness to come up with an outline of how extra-sensory perception emerged in the human brain and mind. Third, SRI had learned enough by watching successful ‘natural’ remote viewers perform (including Swann himself), to develop a method that could be passed on to other, apparently non-psychic persons.

Starting from what had been learned over the previous ten years at SRI about human psychic functioning, Puthoff and Swann in the early 1980s experimented extensively with Ingo Swann as guinea pig to figure out what did and didn’t work. The final result was a meticulously-designed system they called “CRV’ for “coordinate remote viewing.”

The Six Stages of Controlled Remote Viewing

CRV was first called “coordinate remote viewing” because it used geographic coordinates instead of outbounder “beacon” teams to focus the viewer on the target. Years later, Ingo Swann changed the term “coordinate” remote viewing to “controlled” remote viewing. This is how I will refer to it from here on.

Stage 1 & 2

A full CRV session goes through six “stages,”or levels, each one more involved and detailed than the one before. Stage 1 is the launching point of the session, giving the viewer a brief “glimpse” of the basic nature of the target. This first stage doesn’t take long to get through, though, and the viewer mentally transitions quickly into Stage 2, where he or she begins to experience sensory impressions from the target, such as colors, qualities of light, smells, textures, tastes, sounds, and so on.

Stage 3

Soon the viewer begins to gain hints of the target’s “dimensionality” – how it occupies physical space. At this point the viewer moves into Stage 3. This stage includes perceptions of height, width, shape, volume, and so on. The viewer almost automatically feels the urge to sketch or draw elements of the target. (Even when the viewer has little artistic ability, these sketches can sometimes be striking.) Many remote viewing sessions end with Stage 3, since the quality of the results may already be good enough for what is needed.

Stage 4

In situations where more detailed information is needed, the viewer may continue the session to Stage 4, which opens him or her to more abstract or complex concepts. For example, let’s say the target is the Eiffel Tower. By the end of Stage 3 the viewer may have done a credible sketch of the cris-crossing girders of the Tower and identified it as a tall, metallic monument-like structure. (At some point she might even have said it “reminded” her “of the Eiffel Tower.” By moving into Stage 4, the viewer opens up to richer impressions. Such concepts as, for example, “foreign,” “park-like setting,” “tourist attraction,” “historical,” “in an urban area,” and so on might be perceived. More conceptually complex targets than the Eiffel Tower (such as a research facility, a crime event, or a museum) may yield numerous pages of conceptual data and sketching.

Stage 5

After Stage 4 is completed (or sometimes even before), moving to Stage 5 becomes an option. Stage 5 is different from the other stages in that it is an “off-signal-line” mode. In other words, the viewer is not processing a real-time psychic signal. Instead, this stage provides a format and procedure for digging out impressions already “dumped” into the viewer’s subconscious by the earlier connection to the remote viewing signal. In effect, the viewer “mines” a large deposit of data that is stored in the subconscious, bringing the information out into the open like someone extracting gold or diamonds buried underground.

Stage 6

Stage 6 can often be the most impressive and interesting of all. It includes the same kind of access to complex or abstract information available in Stage 4 (as well as the more concrete, sensory-based percepts from earlier stages). But Stage 6 also allows the viewer to make an actual three-dimensional model of the target. In essence, the viewer makes a sculpture of the target with modeling compound or other material. Perhaps you have seen the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind–in particular, the scene where Richard Dreyfus, following his ESP impressions, builds a model of Wyoming’s Devil’s Tower out of mashed potatoes on his dinner table. That is very much what CRV Stage 6 is like.

Controlled Remote Viewing incorporates many insights from subliminal perception and split brain research which have direct relevance to remote viewing. A major part of the way CRV is put together is aimed at dealing with mental “noise” – the chatter that goes on in our heads all the time, made up of guessing, inferences, recalled memories, conclusion-jumping, and so on that clouds and disrupts the subtle ESP input. Some people complain that the method seems to them to be “complicated” and “rigid.” But as one’s understanding of the basic human perceptual system grows, it is soon clear just how ingenious the CRV system really is. (Click here to see an example of a Stage-3 level controlled remote viewing session.)

What About Controlled Remote Viewing Now?

The CRV methodology was tried out on a few willing human subjects at SRI starting about 1980. Once that showed the effectiveness of the CRV approach, Ingo Swann, as principal instructor, began teaching it in 1982 to military personnel. Among those he trained were Capt. Tom McNear, Capt. Bill Ray, GS-13 Charlene Shufelt, and Capt. Paul H. Smith. As a last-minute addition, Capt. Ed Dames was added as a student to the training contract. Once our training was completed, we continued over the next several years to train a number of new remote viewers in the CRV methodology. Among these were Master Sgt. Mel Riley, Sergeant First Class Lyn Buchanan, and Capt. David Morehouse.

A number of these folks have gone on to found their own remote viewing teaching programs, using their own modified forms of controlled remote viewing. As you look into remote viewing, you may hear of such remote viewing methodologies as “technical” remote viewing (TRV), “scientific” remote viewing (SRV), and even a couple of new flavors of CRV (such as those taught by David Morehouse or Lyn Buchanan). All these are descendants of the original SRI controlled remote viewing methodology.

However, the purest form of the original CRV methodology is taught through our company Remote Viewing Instructional Services, Inc. with Paul H. Smith, Ph.D. (Major, US Army, ret.), as chief instructor. Dr. Smith, who was the CRV theory instructor and lead author of the original CRV training manual for the military program (and whose doctoral work at the University of Texas focused on the theory and science of mind and consciousness), has only allowed changes in the training and methodology that are in strict accord with new developments in legitimate scientific consciousness research that have occurred since Puthoff and Swann created the initial methodology.

Our courses are more careful, thorough, and complete than those of any of our competitors. Though we provide a challenging program to our students, we tailor our approach to the individual. You will have by far the best and most extensive instructor-to-student interaction available at any price. To find out more about RVIS, Inc.’s remote viewing training program, focusing on the controlled remote viewing methodology, click here.